


Hostage

by Cards_Slash



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mob, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, Stockholm Syndrome, Violence against Children
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-30
Updated: 2016-03-30
Packaged: 2018-05-30 00:33:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6400348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Petruccio's whole family is slaughtered; he wakes up in a narrow closet at the mercy of the man who killed them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hostage

**Author's Note:**

> for the prompt: Federico or Petrucchio hadn't been executed and instead had been taken prisoner. He is understandably angry and hateful, but strange things can happen under extreme circumstances. In short: Stockholm Syndrome happens.

They caught him in the kitchen, slipping on the blood of the man who guarded the back door. The pot on the stove was bubbling over—the soapy looking bubbles salt-scented but sticky with starch from the pasta that had been inside. Over his head, up and up the back stairs, there were more men with guns and long knives that had come to kill his family. Mother (or Claudia, maybe) was screaming-and-screaming and Petruccio had tears in his eyes so thick he could barely see but he could feel the slick grip of the kitchen knife in his bloody hand.

The men, as big and thick as trees, were laughing at him. The guns in their hands were shaking as their shoulders hitched up and dropped. One of them had to turn his head away; but the first was wiping tears off his face, “oh kid,” he said, “I like the feisty ones.”

\--

Petruccio woke up in the dark, in a space long enough to lay one way but not wide enough to even sit with his legs crossed in another. There was a sliver of light that might have slid in under a doorway but neither of Petruccio’s urgent-flat-palms could find a knob to the door. The panic of the dark was a quick-quick-quick breath skating in and out over his tight throat. 

He was crying again (always crying again) as the shaking of his body made something rattle and the suddenness of the metallic sound made him jump and he jerked his foot back toward his body and found it heavier than he remembered. There was a loop of a shackle around his ankle, wide and blunt around the edges. His fingertips followed it around to the chain, the links led him across the narrow space to the end to the anchor drilled into the floor. 

“No,” he whispered in the dark with his fingers and his arms and his chest and his voice shaking-shaking-shaking.

\--

The panel opened and the man who had looked at him with minimal fondness (and a gun in his hand) was leaning down with an arm against the wall over the open panel. “Well come on, you’ve got to be hungry.” He stood there with his shirt missing, the suspenders digging into his square shoulders over the rubbed-thin cotton of his undershirt and the thick-dark curl of his chest hair poking through it here and there. His fingers were thick with blood around the edges and nicks and cuts out of them on the sides. 

Petruccio curled into the corner. “You killed them.”

The man was unimpressed. “Well, you’ll get hungry sooner or later.” Then he stepped away and left the panel open. 

\--

The TV was loud enough to hear through the open panel. The news was playing an endless repeat of the massacre of his family. Petruccio pressed his face against the wall just by the open door and listened-harder-and-harder to the details of the dead. The body guards, the cook, his mother and his sister and his brother and father. He listened to them throwing around ideas like ‘mob ties’ and ‘alleged crime lord’ and cried into the bony knuckles pushed into the bone over his eye. 

\--

Hunger overcame fear. Petruccio crept out on his hands and knees, dragging the chain behind him. The house was quiet all around him, the motion of the other man (or men) had stilled and the smell of cooled food was left behind. He blinked against the light of the room until the fuzziness cleared. The food was on a table and Petruccio stood up and shuffled across the floor to it but the chain pulled him to a short stop before he could get to the table.

The unfairness of it was worse than the hunger.

Petruccio screamed at the table, at the chain, at the man who had brought him here, at the TV that had started again at five-a-m with stories of his family’s death. He threw himself down on his belly and reached toward the table leg with his fingers but his fingernails barely scratched across it. He tried again and again but his fingernails did nothing but catch at the table leg and Petruccio rolled onto his belly and beat his fists against the floor in frustration.

\--

The man came again, wearing a white shirt with the buttons undone, carrying a tie over one of his arms. He looked down at Petruccio sitting on his knees in the kitchen with tears of rage on his face. The man was different in the light—not a gruesome sort of man. He wasn’t an ugly ape of a person but smooth-skinned from a fresh shave. His eyes were dark and his hair was black. He was amused with a quirk of his pink lips as he pulled a chair out from the table.

“Well, there’s some fight left in you after all.” Then he sat in the chair and looked at the plate. He considered it for a moment, as if he were working out whether or not he wanted to bother, and then he glanced down at Petruccio and said, “are you hungry?”

Petruccio thought, _I hate you_ so loudly that it must have been written in pink spots on his face. The TV behind his back was whispering lies about his father and this man was looking back at him without blinking, without fear, without shame, as if he felt nothing at all for having killed his family. “yes.”

“Yes, sir,” the man corrected.

There was bile in his throat and the taste of it on his tongue, but Petruccio grit his teeth and said, “yes _sir_.”

The man nodded his approval at the words and picked the plate up to hand it to him. Petruccio took it and went back to the narrow room in the wall where he could eat it without the man smiling at him with an odd tilt to his grin.

\--

But Father hadn’t been a killer or a mob man. Father had been a banker (Mother always said) and so had Federico. They were fine bankers with fine clothes that left in the morning for work and come home in the evening. 

Their house was not the center of a crime empire, but only a home with six bedrooms and two studies and a kitchen big enough to fit a dozen or two of Father’s favorite associates. But they were bankers themselves, each of them in suits. Each of them with grins and sweet things to say to little boys that were too skinny to play sports and little girls like Claudia, too busy trying to be pretty to bother being smart.

But Petruccio shouldn’t have thought of Claudia because she had been the smallest, like him, and the very memory of him turned in his stomach until he was crying _again_.

\--

The man closed up the wall when he left the house. He said, “behave.”

\--

Petruccio sat inside of his narrow room with the shackle on his foot, watching the man in his white undershirt eating soup out of the big bowl. His own dinner was congealing into cold slop just beyond the bend of his knee. But the man was watching a movie with a laugh track and bright colors, as if he could so carelessly entertain himself. As if there were no man or woman left to know what he had done.

“My father wasn’t a bad man,” Petruccio said. 

The man looked away from the screen with a curiously lifted eyebrow. He said, “your father was a monster,” as if he were reciting phone numbers. He didn’t set the bowl down but pick up the remote to pause his movie. “Your father killed more men than I have.” But a pinch in his face made him tilt his head, he said, “what did you think he did?”

“My father was a banker!” Petruccio shouted at him. He was on his feet again, with his hands in fists and his teeth gritted against the accusation of anything else. There was slimy soup under his feet, bits of overcooked potato squishing through his filthy socks and into the spaces between his toes. “Do not speak of him! You are a murderer! You are a kidnapper!”

The man snorted at that. A faint pink streak ran across the bridge of his nose. “Quiet down, boy. If you get the neighbor’s attention, things won’t go so well for you.” Then he got to his feet and padded to the skinny kitchen set into a corner of the room. He picked up a roll of paper towels and brought them over to throw at Petruccio. “Clean up your mess.”

\--

“Look,” the man said after breakfast. He dropped a manila envelope on the floor in front of Petruccio’s bony knees. “Look at what your father’s done.”

He didn’t touch it. The corners were ragged from being opened and stuffed full again and again. The papers inside were peeking out through holes worn from repeated use. There were glossy-edged photographs spilling out the top. The technicolor rich red spilling across a dirty ground caught in perfect stillness by flashbulbs and eager photographers.

“I know my father,” Petruccio whispered.

“We all thought we knew our fathers once. They’re not often what we thought they were.” But the man did not push the issue. He went to get a drink instead.

\--

It was not the first man, but another, that opened the panel at the end of the next day. Petruccio had been laying on his back in the dark, head pillowed on a rolled-flat cushion while he tried to pick apart the lies he heard on the TV. 

The slant of hard light cut across his legs where he’d pulled his pants when the air of the closet grew too hot and too stale to bear. The face that peered in at him was unfamiliar, not one of the men who had broken into his Father’s house and slaughtered his family.

This new man reached down to pull him out by the ankle. He was grunting from the effort of it. The heaving weight of his gut bouncing up and down as Petruccio kicked at him to be free but not even a solid blow to his swollen stomach got the hand off him. 

“Let me go!” Petruccio shouted. His arms were too skinny to carry force, his hands too slim and small to deliver damage. He beat against the man and did nothing to him. The man put a knee across him, held him down with his body and wrapped one of his fat hands around Petruccio’s neck. His thumb and his fingers cut into the arteries in his neck (wasn’t that what Federico had told him, once upon a time, so very long ago. _Squeeze right here, Petruccio, squeeze right here and out like a light._ ). It was hard to think with grayness going down over his eyes, it was hard to breath with no space to expand his lungs and no space to drag air into his throat.

He was kicking (he thought) and screaming (he hoped) and his fingernails were digging into long sleeves and raw flesh. It peeled under his nails like fat slabs of bacon. 

\--

Petruccio woke up with a gasp, a raw-sore-swollen throat, and a throbbing headache. He woke up in a warzone, where the TV (set against the same wall as his little closet) was face-down on the TV. The table was sideways, one of the legs was broken off. There was shattered glass on the floor. 

The chair was the same, the man with the fine black suit sitting there with blood washed down his chin and throat from a cut that ran across his lips. He had a knife in one hand, a gun setting on the table in front of him. His hair had been pulled free and it fell around his face but he was wiping his mouth with a folded paper towel with absolute civility. “Well, kid,” he said, “looks like you’ve got a choice to make.”

The fat man was sitting on the floor with his arms tied behind his back and his face striped with scratches and bruises. His lips were swollen and one of his eyes was pushed closed by the ugly purple bubbles that grew from the bones of his face. 

Petruccio was sobbing with breath, dragging into his lungs, until his slim chest was heaving up-and-down-and—

“Seems to me, some part of you,” the man with the smart black suit said, “knows your father wasn’t a banker. Whatever part of you is smart enough to work that out needs to do the thinking because that’s the part of a man that keeps him alive in extreme circumstances. We aren’t animals, son. We have to make choices that keep us alive but we have to make the choices that separate us from these sorts of things.” He motioned over at the fat mat with a knife and then stood up. His tie was in a puddle on the seat where he’d been sitting. He bent to pick up his gun and held it in his left hand with an awkward grip. 

“My father wasn’t a bad man,” Petruccio croaked.

“But he wasn’t a banker,” was the retort. The man took a step forward and held out the knife. He flipped it so he was holding the blade between two fingers and offering the hilt to Petruccio. “That fat ass tried to kill you.”

Petruccio took the knife from him, stared up at his face and tried to work out what he was meant to do. (But it wasn’t that confusing was it?) Petruccio stood up on unsteady legs and his head was just _throbbing_. The fresh terror of barely surviving the attack was too bleak to _feel_. He was a pleasant sort of numb where everything made sense in a way it hadn’t ever made sense to him before. 

Mother had said to him, _do not let the other boys push you. If they do push you once, do not wait for them to push you twice._

“You killed my family,” Petruccio said to the man with the fine black suit.

“Yes,” the man said. 

There were tears in his eyes then; a shiver of stress that ran down his spine to his legs that felt as weak as jelly. His hand clutched at the knife in his slick, sweaty palm, and he licked the salt-snot-sweat-taste off his lips. “Why did you stop him then?”

The man sighed, he sat on the arm of his chair and shifted the grip of his gun to his right hand. “You’re just a kid, aren’t you? You’ve got a right to decide for yourself; a right to know what’s going on in the world, don’t you? I tell you, your father was a butcher. Your family was wolves. They made enemies with men that God himself wouldn’t rile.” 

Petruccio blinked his eyes and tears poured down his hot cheeks. His fingers squeezed around the knife again, when his grip felt so loose he thought he’d lose it. “My sister never hurt anyone,” he said.

“No,” the man said quietly, “no she didn’t. I couldn’t save her. I can find you the man that did her. I can give you that; but you’ve got to make a choice kid.” The sound of the gun cocking drew Petruccio’s attention away from the fat man’s purpled face. The man in the fine suit looked resigned with a sigh, “because I don’t want to kill you but you’re either an asset or you’re baggage and I can’t deal with baggage. Now I’m sorry it had to happen so quick, I thought you’d have some more time to make a choice. But that’s the way it is. You or him.”

Petruccio sniffled again. He looked at the knife in his hand. The bile was in his mouth again and his heart was beating so fast he was getting dizzy from it. Every part of his body was vibrating but he couldn’t _feel_ anything. He said, “I don’t know how,” like a gasp.

The man said, “life is hard kid, nobody’s going to do it for you.”

Petruccio was _crying_ (again, still) and the man on his knees with his face turning purple was laughing at him. He was chuckling like rumbling, like thunder coming out of the bottom of his gut. When he moved forward he wasn’t even sure what he was going to do but his hand was swinging forward and the tip of the knife was digging into the rolled flesh of the fat man’s neck. It resisted, stretched and pushed back so that Petruccio had to lean his weight into it. The man was rearing back but Petruccio followed as they fell over. He put both of his hands on the knife and he drove it _down_ with hiccups-and-coughs as the vibrating feeling in his chest grew so large he couldn’t control it another minute. 

It did not shatter, but give slowly. The bubbling seep of blood creeping around the edges of the wound. Petruccio sat back with a gasp of shock and found the man smiling at him. 

“Not bad.” Then he stood up and he shot the fat man in the head twice. The convulsing of his body stilled and the whole room was _silent_. The man sighed again and then dug into his pocket to pull out a key, “go on and unlock it. We’ve got to get out of here before the police arrive.”

\--

The house was on fire when they left it. The man took nothing but a single suitcase that stood by the front door. When he opened the front door the whole world was wide-open and waiting. Petruccio stood with his feet on the steps and his mind full of _wild_ ideas about running anywhere but straight for the front door of the car. 

He looked down the street at the neighbors. He looked at the cars that were tucked neatly into driveways. He looked up at trees fat with leaves and the sky that was swollen purple with evening sun. 

Petruccio closed his eyes and let the cool wind blow across his hot face. He spread his fingers and closed his fists again; the blood was tacky and half-dried like glue sticking his fist together.

\--

They were in the car, Petruccio with bloody hands and quick breath, and the man said, “if you try to leave me; the men like that will find you. I won’t save you a second time. Remember that.”

Petruccio nodded his head. He smeared his red palms down his khaki pants and tried to keep himself from screaming (again). 

“Say you understand.”

“I understand,” Petruccio whispered and when he glanced over the man was frowning through the front window with his lip swollen and split. Petruccio sniffled and cleared his throat, “sir.” He leaned his head against the door of the car and watched the trees go by; his head felt heavy and his body was dragging him down. It felt as if everything were being pulled down the wide-mouthed drain in the upstairs bathtub. He had sat and watch the water swirl-and-swirl-and-swirl.

\--

Petruccio woke up in a hotel room, laying in a bathtub with a neatly folded stack of clothes on the toilet seat next to him. He sat up and listened for the sound of anything else in the room—but there was only the dim noise of neighbors in other rooms around him. There was sunlight coming in through the front-facing window, he could see the street just beyond a narrow parking lot from where he was clinging to the corner. The two beds in the room looked as if they had never been touched and there was neither the man nor the suitcase left as any indication he would return.

For a moment he thought wildly about running for the door. He thought about it in perfect color—the rush of his feet, the wild pump of his heart, and the scream that would certainly unfurl from the center of his chest as soon as he passed through the doorway. There had to be someone working in the office of the hotel and if not that then a neighbor with a phone. He could run into traffic and find anyone to listen to him. 

He had been taken, his family had been murdered. There were bruises all around his throat and rubbed off skin on his ankle. His story was corroborated in wounds and the police would have to take him. 

Petruccio took a step for the door and saw the manila envelope laying on the chair beneath the window. It was the same today as it had been when the man dropped it in front of him. It spoke an echo of the words he’d used. (You’re smart enough to know your father was not a banker.) 

If he’d been slapped it might have been a kinder feeling than the stalled-out-doubt that left him heaving for breath (all alone) in a hotel room. Father was a good man: church on Sundays, attended school functions, played with his kids on the weekends. Father was an organized man: with ledgers and files and offices filled with things. Father was a loyal man with a family grown from strangers with names as familiar to Petruccio as his own sister. There was no violence and no hate in his Father’s face when he sat at the table and laughed at Claudia’s jokes. 

No, but there was a stillness in his face the way there was a pinch in Federico’s. There was a lie that whispered around the family from the mouths of the men and his Mother standing too tall for such talk to be heard by little boys. Petruccio had grown up in the care of a dozen men, surrounded by tall fences and constant vigilance. 

He thought: (I could run, I could be free), but ( _Whatever part of you is smart enough to know that out needs to do the thinking because that’s the part of a man that keeps him alive in extreme circumstances._ )

Petruccio went back to the bathroom. He took a shower hot enough to scald his skin, scrubbed himself until he was pink and clean at last. There was a toothbrush and toothpaste at the sink and he stood naked and shivering in the hotel-room-chill until his teeth were smooth and white again. The clothes that had been left fit him precisely. The cotton was thick and wonderful against the sore parts of his body and he pulled the hoodie on last and flipped it up to cover his damp hair before he went out to sit on the bed and keep himself busy with cartoons until the man returned.

\--

The maid came first, knocking with a quick knuckle and barging in without an answer. She said, “are you in here alone?”

He said, “my father went to get something to eat,” and he had no way of knowing it was true. “You shouldn’t come in until he’s back.”

She (Amy, maybe) looked at him with a quirk of her eyebrow and then reached around the door to pull the ‘Do Not Disturb’ hanger off the inside of the door and slid it over the outside. “Tell your Dad to remember about this next time.” Then she went back the way she came.

\--

Petruccio was asleep when the man came back (at last), carrying his suitcase and a sack of food with grease spots soaking through the paper. He set his suitcase down and dropped into the chair by the door. There was fresh blood seeping out of the wound over his mouth and new scuff marks on his suit jacket. “I sent the maid away,” Petruccio said. 

The man looked over at him, then the door and nodded his head. He leaned forward far enough to throw the sack to the bed and then sat back with a heavy sigh. His fingers slid down into the pocket of his suit jacket and he pulled out a slim pill bottle that rattled when he shook it. “I didn’t think you’d be here.”

Petruccio slid off the end of the bed and padded to the bathroom to get a wet washcloth and a glass of water. He came back to find the man grimacing as he dry swallowed the pills he’d shaken out of the bottle. So he handed him the rag first and motioned at his mouth and the blood that was running across his lip and onto his chin. 

For a moment, they regarded one another. “You’ll have to be patient,” the man said when the took the rag from him. He pressed it over the gaping wound on his mouth. “The men that sent me to kill your family—they counted the bodies. They know they’re one short and they know its you. You want a shot at taking out the man that killed your sister, we’re going to have to go away until you’re big enough to fight for yourself.”

Petruccio considered it, just long enough to make his stomach roll over in hunger at the sweaty stink of the onions on the burgers in the bag behind him. He held out the glass toward the man, he said, “my sister never hurt anyone—” but also, “sir.”


End file.
